Going Beyond the Tale of a Boy and His Horse

Posted on Feb 29, 2012

There was nothing easy about any of this. Draft refusers were mocked and jeered (mobs threw rotten eggs at them when given the chance), jailed under harsh conditions, and lost the right to vote for five years. But with war’s end, in a devastated country mourning its losses and wondering what could possibly justify that four-year slaughter, many people came to feel differently about the resisters. More than half a dozen were eventually elected to the House of Commons and the journalist Morel became the Labour Party’s chief Parliamentary spokesperson on foreign affairs. Thirty years after the Armistice, a trade unionist named Arthur Creech Jones, who had spent two and a half years in prison as a war resister, was appointed to the British cabinet.

The bravery of such men and women in speaking their minds on one of the great questions of the age cost them dearly: in public scorn, prison terms, divided families, lost friends and jobs. And yet they are largely forgotten today at a moment when resistance to pointless wars should be celebrated. Instead we almost always tend to celebrate those who fight wars—win or lose—rather than those who oppose them.

It’s not just the films and TV shows we watch, but the monuments and museums we build. No wonder, as General Omar Bradley once said, that we “know more about war than we know about peace.” We tend to think of wars as occasions for heroism, and in a narrow, simple sense they can be. But a larger heroism, sorely lacking in Washington this last decade, lies in daring to think through whether a war is worth fighting at all. In looking for lessons in wars past, there’s a much deeper story to be told than that of a boy and his horse.

Adam Hochschild is the author of “King Leopold’s Ghost” and “Bury the Chains,” among other works. His latest bestselling book, “To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), focuses on the antiwar critics of World War I. Now available in paperback, it is a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. To listen to Timothy MacBain’s latest Tomcast audio interview in which Hochschild discusses the largely untold stories of those in England who opposed involvement in World War I and the message they offer for our own time, click here, or download it to your iPod here.

truedigger3: I suggest you send your comment in to Wikipedia and see if it will pass muster with their researchers and be incorporated in the Wiki article I was quoting. (My personal opinion is that the real cause of all wars is stupidity, but nobody wants to admit that because wars stimulate the production of billions of dollars worth of weaponry and stupid people don’t think twice about making money out of killing people.)

bernhiem: I think you overstate the case regarding humanity’s lack of ability to benefit from accumulated knowledge, and relating that to Manning and Assange. It is precisely because the government fears that American people (and indeed, people worldwide) DO have “the ability to benefit from the WikiLeaks revelations” and become wiser about what goes on behind the scenes, that they rush to try to indict Manning and Assange. Anytime anyone documents evil, that person can expect retribution—and the need arises for masses of people to rise at once to the defense of heroes.

Just further proof that humankind is incapable of benefitting from accumulated knowledge of any but that of a frivolous or greed driven nature. How else to explain the current persecution of Bradley Manning as well as Julian Assange? Also, we concoct scurillous and irrational reasons for the ever worsening conditions scene throughout the world and never address the ultimate cause of humanity’s woes, namely an unbridled and insane growth of the world’s population with all of the destruction it portends! Oh, and please spare me all of the theological BS as arguement against this reality. Don’t for a moment believe that those clerical parasites out there think a whit about the fate of humanity beyond maintaining their priveleged status as arbitors of all things “spiritual”!

“historians from the same culture have been shown to come to differing conclusions on the causes of the war.”———————————————————————-
gerard,
For each war there is the real cause and there is the bullshit cause.
The real cause for the WWI was that Germany at that time, was a rising formidable industrial, scientific and military power and with its poor diplomacy scared and antagonized everybody.
What more atagonized everybody of its colonial neighbors aka the British, French and the Russians is that Germany demanded a share in the loot from the colonies.
It was very easy for the British with their superb cunning diplomacy to unite almost the whole of Europe against Germany.
The US sided with the British and their allies because if Germany would win, then the US will have to confront in the future a united Europe under the Germany with more population and resources from the colonies.

gerard the flu epidemic started at a supply dump /troop transfer point called etaple in france in late 16 or early 17. i think it actually ended in 23-24 at least in scotland. in canada where i live 100000 natives are thought to have died of the flu in the twenties no one was counting or treating it on the reserves or in northern canada, so anecdotal evidence is used to make this estimate, grave yard numbers and interviews.

Brief summare from Wikipedia: “In attributing causes for the war, historians and academics had to deal with an unprecedented flood of memoirs and official documents, released as each country involved tried to avoid blame for starting the war. Early releases of information by governments, particularly those released for use by the “Commission on the Responsibility of the Authors of the War” were shown to be incomplete and biased. In addition some documents, especially diplomatic cables between Russia and France, were found to have been doctored. Even in later decades however, when much more information had been released, historians from the same culture have been shown to come to differing conclusions on the causes of the war.”

“In 1918 an international influenza epidemic of 1918-1919 killed more people than the Great War, known today as World War I.” I still remember the gold-framed sepia photograph of proudly-uniformed Cousin Laurence on the enamel mantel over the fireplace in the livingroom of what was once his home. He lived through the war, but died of “flu” before they could ship him back to the States.

THE SPARK…A LITTLE MAN WITH A LITTLE PISTOL…HISTORIANS ARE STILL
PUZZLED WHY THE MURDER OF AN ARISTOCRAT WOULD LEAD TO A WORLD
WAR…A GUESS COULD BE THAT WHEN A STATE RELIGION BECOMES
MILITARISM AND FASHIONABLE…THIS INFECTION CAN SPREAD AND EASE
INTO WAR…HYPNOTIZED…

The only point of contention I have with this article is the statement that the better educated were hit disportionatley hard in WWI. At lest they usually had incomes and financial worth to cushion the injuries and loses, which the poor largely did not have. Their families were living on the edge and then lost their main wage earner to the war which should never have been.

I had a great Uncle who was raised a solid farmer in the middle of the country and he was repeatedly gassed in the trenchs and contracted TB as a result. He spent the last 10 years of his life battling TB and spending much of the time ill. He died at 33 young years.

I have a cousin, the son of my second Great Uncle who also served in the trenches and spent his life suffering from PTS. His sisters families state he kept them awake at night on visits, screaming. He never married and worked his life as farm labor.He was 47 when he died.

All their years fought for a war that destroyed so many and impoverished a large part of the world. All for Arrogant Men who thought they were in control. All because of knee-jerk patriotic manipulation and inspite of everything the powerful still use the same strategy with the same disasterous results, except for the wealth that the patriotic industrialist and investor makes upon the mayhem.

I think we all want to be proud of our country and our culture, but if we keep allowing ourselves to be led around by the nose by incompetent leaders, well whose fault is it?

THE SPARK…ONE LITTLE MAN WITH A LTTLE PISTOL ...HISTORIANS ARE STILL
PUZZLED WHY THE DEATH OF ONE ARISTOCRAT COULD RESULT IN WORLD
WAR…A GUESS COULD BE MILITARISM AS STATE RELIGION…AND THIS
INFECTION BECOMING FASHIONABLE…A CASUAL LEAD INTO MASS
PSYCHOSIS…

Where is the great screen writer who will bring the heroic and little known epic story of Eugene Debbs to the screen? I have often thought that his story had everything…drama, politics, race, religion, war. He was a remarkable man with a body of amazing work that would make a really important statement about American history. All those years ago when I saw Warren Beatty in “Red”, I thought that the Debbs story would have been so much more interesting and relevent to USAmerican history buffs.
USAmericans are undereducated and not very curious. We need stories. That is why the movie industry has been so important to our culture. Of course, it is a mixed bag. Bad history is the norm, in the movies (ie The Alamo… in it’s various incarnations).
We are approaching the centenial of The Great War. Perhaps there will be some good art to come from it….one can hope.

The various British “Royals” began to intermarry with Protestant European nobility following the House of Stuart’s tendency to revert to Catholicism. So Queen Mary was wed to William of Orange (Holland) and subsequently Germany’s House of Hanover provided the Georges -First, Second & Third. Queen Victoria later married Prince Albert of the House of Saxe Cobourg -
Gotha (changed to Windsor in WWI). The British monarch is also the head of the Church of England .(Episcopal Church in the U.S. had to realign its apostolic authority through Scottish bishops beginning with the American Revolution to avoid swearing allegiance to the English crown).